Genning up on the big data privacy debate

On Monday, there’s an online debate being held to discuss the issue of research and data privacy in a social media world. We’ll be covering the highlights on Tuesday – but if you’re planning to listen in, here’s some weekend reading for you in preparation for the event.

The best place to start is with the Esomar and Casro social media guidelines and the MRS discussion paper on online privacy, the publications of which were the catalyst for this debate – and which spurred a frustrated response from Michalis Michael over on the DigitalMR blog.

Ray Poynter (now of Vision Critical) also wrote a blog post in response, arguing that “we need to change the whole of commercial market research to match the 21st Century, rather than try to keep shoehorning the new world into the old constructs”.

I disagreed, arguing in my own comment piece that the very ethics Poynter questions the need for – in particular anonymity and informed consent – are the very things consumers are now demanding from the advertisers who track their web behaviour without permission and use that data to build up profiles for targeted advertising. Why wouldn’t they expect the same of researchers, even though researchers aren’t engaged in selling?

Research Now’s Annie Pettit makes the point on her LoveStats blog that what researchers are engaged in in social media is no different to that practised by psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists – who can observe and study people in a public place without informed consent provided they do no harm and respect the subject.

“Do no harm” is a core ethical principle that Reg Baker of Market Strategies does not want to see abandoned. “The larger worry for me,” he writes in his Survey Geek blog, “is the deaf ear many in the industry are turning to the public’s obvious concern about online privacy. The regular dust-ups we see when this site or that site changes its privacy policy should be all the evidence we need to convince us that people genuinely care about this stuff.”

Once you’ve read all that, head on over to the Greenbook Blog to register for the debate, and don’t forget to have your say.